When I was an apprentice in The Bethlehem Institute (now reconfigured as Bethlehem College and Seminary) my favorite class was Practical Theology.

This class took place over a two-year cycle and consisted of attended about 50 hours of instruction from Dr. Piper on 10 different themes. Each theme was presented in seminar fashion, over a Friday night and Saturday morning (5 hours per seminar), to be followed by some reading on our part after which a paper was due. So 10 different themes, each related to the subject of Dr. Piper’s writing.

For one of these seminars the assigned reading was Future Grace and a critical response from a Mark W. Kariberg. We were asked to write a response to Kariberg. Here’s a link to my response. Issues include the distinction between justification and sanctification as well as the Covenant of Works.

]]>http://alexchediak.com/2017/12/john-piper-on-the-doctrine-of-faith-alone.php/feed0http://alexchediak.com/2017/12/john-piper-on-the-doctrine-of-faith-alone.phpWhy Notre Dame’s Graduates Should Have Listened to Vice President Pencehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/alexchediak/~3/Ew4hH_jfRJY/why-notre-dames-graduates-should-have-listened-to-vice-president-pence.php
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Vice President Mike Pence gave the Commencement address at Notre Dame this past Sunday in his home state of Indiana. He praised Notre Dame as a “vanguard of freedom of expression and the free exchange of ideas.” But the Vice-President criticized the political correctness that has become common elsewhere.

Ironically, a group of graduates took the opportunity to walk out during the Vice-President’s speech. This was a planned demonstration on the part of 50-100 students, less than 5 percent of the 2,100 graduates gathered.

Sasse has no issue with adolescence. The problem is one of perpetual adolescence — an indefinite period in which youth are passive and aimless. Why is this so common? In part because teens today are used to an unprecedented degree of comfort. Raising kids once meant adding small (but necessary) workers to the family.

Teens today are used to an unprecedented degree of comfort. Our kids may be safer, but they’re also softer. But our wealth, technology, and digital economy have radically changed this pattern. We now emphasize the protection of our children rather than their productivity. While our kids may be safer, they’re also softer — more hooked on comforts like AC, their own bedroom, an Xbox, etc. They are unfamiliar with manual labor at a time when lifelong learning and flexibility are more important than ever in our disrupted economy.

Until recently, a bachelor’s degree was a sure ticket to social mobility and a promising career. But today’s graduates face unprecedented headwinds in the form of declining wages, ballooning student debt, and greater competition for fewer jobs.

That’s the case journalist Jeff Selingo makes in an insightful new book, There is Life After College (HarperCollins). “The plight of today’s young adults,” writes Selingo, “is a result of a longer-term shift in the global workforce that is having an outsized impact on people in their twenties who have little work experience.”

Selingo presents his case persuasively. Young adult unemployment is at its highest point in four decades, peaking at 9 percent a few years ago. Of arguably greater consequence, nearly half of college graduates in their twenties are underemployed, beating out their less educated peers for barista and clerical jobs. With a glut of supply, employers can be choosy, leading to the increasingly common “unpaid internship” expectation, and other forms of “try before you buy” hiring. To make matters worse, student debt loads among recent graduates are at an all-time high and starting salaries are barely budging. While Mom and Dad once beamed when their child received his or her diploma, the uncertainty and instability of the early professional years now give parents reason to worry afresh.

Last week Dr. Wayne Grudem published an article arguing that voting for Donald Trump is a morally good choice. I wrote a response. An excerpt:

I agree with Dr. Grudem that character is not the only factor to consider. But there is a character threshold that we should expect any candidate to meet. A man who owns his vices as if they were virtues, who talks proudly about “going after the families” of suspected terrorists, who has profited from strip clubs, who is by all accounts a pathological liar, who disparaged a disabled journalist, who insulted POWs, who criticized the looks of a rival’s wife, is unworthy of the office of president.

In addition, I suspect Trump’s personal flaws are so pervasive that they would seriously interfere with his ability to enact the helpful policies that Dr. Grudem believes Trump will implement. Notice Trump’s profound inability to stay on message, in recent days needlessly resurrecting past rivalries while opening a feud with Khizr and Ghazala Khan (parents of an Army Captain who gave his life to save others on the battlefield). When we consider Trump’s brash temperament, impulsiveness, and unwillingness to learn, along with his pettiness and tendency to make everything about him, I lack confidence that he can successfully work with Congress to implement the helpful parts of his platform.

]]>http://alexchediak.com/2016/08/is-voting-for-donald-trump-a-morally-good-choice.php/feed0http://alexchediak.com/2016/08/is-voting-for-donald-trump-a-morally-good-choice.phpOnly 11% of employers think graduating students have the skills that their businesses needhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/alexchediak/~3/tI8n9Q3ND2E/only-11-of-employers-think-graduating-students-have-the-skills-that-their-businesses-need.php
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How can employers be simultaneously unhappy with the quality of recent graduates and more desirous of hiring people with greater amounts of formal education? Ryan Craig, founding Managing Director of University Ventures, writes:

What we’re seeing from employers—the ultimate consumers of higher education—is the result of dissatisfaction with the current level of talent being produced by colleges and universities. Employers are dissatisfied and are flailing about for answers. For many employers, this means credential inflation—requiring certain degrees for jobs that previously didn’t require them. An equally logical response for others is openness to alternative credentials.

Though it may have gotten buried with the New Year’s holiday, I had an article published in Fox News Opinion on how to get a college degree without going broke. I outlined five things every student can do. Here’s the opening:

The disappearance of low-skilled jobs and a rising earnings premium sparked a dramatic uptick in college enrollment over the past few decades.

At first, students could afford it, graduating with minimal (if any) debt, and entering an expanding job market with rising wages.

But now? Real median household income is down 6.5% from 2007-2014. Salaries for 25-34 year olds have remained stagnant for a decade. Meanwhile, the price of college continues its precipitous rise. And countless students and families feel caught between a rock and a hard place: They can’t afford to send their kids to college, but their kids can’t afford not to have degrees.

]]>http://alexchediak.com/2016/01/5-suggestions-for-getting-a-college-degree-without-going-broke.php/feed0http://alexchediak.com/2016/01/5-suggestions-for-getting-a-college-degree-without-going-broke.phpLow-Income Americans’ Kids Can Go to College for Freehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/alexchediak/~3/5f_vQOWIFOg/low-income-americans-kids-can-go-to-college-for-free.php
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One of the reasons I wrote Beating the College Debt Trap is that it seemed to me that millions of Americans don’t know how the whole paying for college thing works. The system is intimidating, confusing, and complicated, so they stay clear of it altogether.

A July 2015 study from the Urban Institute confirms my suspicions. As the U.S. News & World Report summarized: “A new study details how college is surprisingly affordable for the lowest income Americans. Yet fewer than half of them enroll in college, and 12 percent of those who do enroll fail to apply for financial aid.” Here’s more from the U.S. News & World Report write-up:

Full-time students from the lowest family-income quartile (family incomes under $30,000) who were enrolled in public two-year or four-year colleges in their own state received enough grant aid, on average, to cover their tuition and fees during the 2011-12 school year, and have money left over to help cover books and living expenses, according the report. These students, on average, received more than $9,700 for a four-year public university in their state, leaving them with more than $2,200 for books and living expenses. Grant aid includes money from federal and state governments, colleges and universities, employers, other private sources and from estimated federal tax credits and deductions.

For families with slightly higher family income, up to $40,000, grant aid is usually still generous enough to cover tuition and fees at many public institutions. Over 90 percent of those families received an average of more than $11,000 in grant aid from federal, state and institutional sources in 2011–12, according to a 2013 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, cited by the Urban Institute report.

In another financial aid calculation cited in the report, grant aid covered the entire tuition at public four-year institutions for 44 percent of students from families with incomes below $50,000. Another 35 percent paid less than $2,000 in tuition after grant aid. At public two-year colleges, 66 percent of these low-income students had no net tuition, and another 32 percent paid less than $2,000.

Yet, more than half of the nation’s lowest-income students aren’t going to college. Only 46 percent of low-income students (from the bottom 20 percent of family incomes) who recently finished high school were enrolled in college in 2013, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Read the whole thing. I discussed this theme in this article as well as my new book, Beating the College Debt Trap. The good news is that students today can get the training they need to launch a career without going broke in the process. Graduation on solid financial footing is possible. But it will require knowing how the system works, intentionality, creativity, and delayed gratification.

This is a time in the year that many of us give to nonprofit organizations. Have you ever thought, “I’d love to give to this organization, but I wish I knew how they use their money?”

Well now you can know. Guidestar lets you pull financial data on all sorts of non-profits (charities, schools, ministries, you name it). For free (mostly–some reports require a modest fee to access). You can quickly see each organization’s revenue vs. expenses for a recent year. The 990 Forms are particularly instructive–you’re basically looking at their tax forms (where they get their revenue, how they spend it, and more). Buried in the 990 forms is data that can be useful if you work for a nonprofit, or are seeking to do so, and want to have a sense of what the salary expectations might be at a particular level (director, vice president, etc.). Top salaries vary widely depending on the organization’s size and scope, but these data can be found in Part VII of the 990 Forms.

I hope Guidestar helps you give generously and with discernment to causes that you care about.

]]>http://alexchediak.com/2015/12/fascinating-website-for-evaluating-non-profits.php/feed0http://alexchediak.com/2015/12/fascinating-website-for-evaluating-non-profits.phpWhy more teenagers and college students need to work while in schoolhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/alexchediak/~3/97z9jY6kQJM/why-more-teenagers-and-college-students-need-to-work-while-in-school.php
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Jeff Selingo is right: Too few college students hold a significant part-time job before graduation. As a result, they struggle with professionalism in the work place. Selingo reports that “the number of teenagers who have some sort of job while in school has dropped from nearly 40 percent in 1990 to just 20 percent today, an all-time low since the United States started keeping track in 1948.”

Why aren’t more students working? Reasons include a poor labor market for teens and the fact that minimum wage earnings don’t go far relative to escalating college prices (tuition, fees, textbooks, etc.). Many students decide it’s better (or easier) to take out loans and focus on getting good grades.

But as I explain in Beating the College Debt Trap, straight A’s don’t make up for lack of work experience. Moreover, if students leverage their skills, and practice resourcefulness and creativity, above minimum wage work is available (see Traps 6 & 7). And as Selingo observes, the value of a part-time job for a college student extends far beyond the pay check:

A job teaches young people how to see a rhythm to the day, especially the types of routine work teenagers tend to get. It’s where they learn the importance of showing up on time, keeping to a schedule, completing a list of tasks, and being accountable to a manager who might give them their first dose of negative feedback so they finally realize they’re not as great as their teachers, parents, and college acceptance letters have led them to believe.

Working part-time while going to school also improves self-awareness. The employers I interviewed said that today’s college graduates are willing to work hard to get the job done. But all of them had stories about the behaviors they found unacceptable: young employees checking Facebook incessantly on their computers, leaving in the middle of a team project meeting to go for a workout at the gym, or asking for a do-over when an assignment went awry.